The Royal Institution
What can modern results in astrobiology tell us about the prospects for finding intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe?
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The famous Drake equation, which provides a rough estimate of the number of civilisations in our galaxy, predicts that space should be teaming with aliens. So where are they and why have we not found them yet?
Watch the Q&A here: https://youtu.be/l7Xh_aphD30
Ian Andrew Crawford is professor of planetary science and astrobiology at Birkbeck, University of London. Crawford is a specialist in the science and exploration of the Moon and in the search for life in the Universe. Before switching his research interests to planetary science in 2003, Crawford had a 15-year career at University College London as an observational astronomer specialising in studies of the interstellar medium. He is the author of over 130 peer-reviewed research papers in the fields of astronomy, planetary science, astrobiology and space exploration. Crawford is a Fellow, and currently Vice President, of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a former member of the European Space Sciences Committee (ESSC) of the European Science Foundation. In 2014 he was appointed to the European Space Agency’s Human Spaceflight and Exploration Science Advisory Committee (HESAC).
This talk and Q&A were filmed at the Ri on 16 October 2017.
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But God is not an equation that can be isolated
He needs to take Xanax and slow down. His nervous rambling is killing me
You will not be able to find a conscious life
comparable to ours outside the earth.
Even if the universe is full of life.
We simply do not coincide in time.
perfect voice for insomniacs.
Even if we were to find another habitable planet, don’t you think it would be too much power? Maybe there’s a reason we can’t find another, because something wants to keep us away from finding it. The true natives of the universe-extraterrestrials. They helped us in the past but who knows right?
Sometimes I think that super intelligent space travelling aliens are studying us
The search for extraterrestrial life is indistinct from the search for the origin of heaven.
Do you have to be bald to give RI lecture?
Perhaps there are interstellar civilisations who have managed to get their mitts on ftl travel and communications …. but don't bother venturing beyond 100 light years from their home.
This was boring nothing new. What about the tons of meteorites hitting the Earth and looming with viruses / bacteria. They come from somewhere.
Millions of reported UFO sightings over the decades, the bulk of scientists claim 100% of them are misapprehensions. Sometimes common sense is a lot more accurate than materialist scrutiny.
I feel that Atheists are afraid God might be real and that their only hope at peace and solace is to find Aliens. Search youtube for "Boltzmann brain" where the father of statistical thermodynamics proves mathematically that it is infinitely more likely for the universe to suddenly "become" conscious than it would be for life to form as it is now. The only reason why the universe didn't spawn an intelligence is as stated , "Just because something is infinitely more probable, doesn't neccesarily mean it will certainly happen"
It is implicit in the concept of 'UFOs' that a civilisation has overcome the apparently insurmountable problems of space travel, and used up huge resources in order to visit earth. Such a civilisation would have to be vastly in advance of what has been achieved on earth. What is their objective? It is unlikely to be benign – they must be expecting a huge return on that level of outlay.
So where di all this matter come from? Eternally existing? Or God created it. Choose your religion…erteranltiy of matter or eteranlity of God. Then look at DNA and you can also deduce intelligent design vs natural selection. THe math favors intelligetn design hugely. SO back up your science wih math and then belive in an intellgent creator. It is all faith/religion. INtellegent desing is so much more easy to believe knwing teh math in DNA and how each creature is following a DNA sequence to reprodice and exist as complex irreducible systems that chance and antural selection could never have explained. There is a move by scientists in the modern era with Einstein beliving in an intellegent designer as the cause of life. The science of evolution from single cell to complex structuresis a theory that is goign down as a complete failure to explain the world we live in.
There's no way to know if we are alone in the universe but we may find out there is life somewhere.
This is all old news , they known of these planets and other species of civilization. They have to slowly show us these things. It would ruin religion. Eventhough religon is dying at an alarming rate. You can see they are slowly showing us. The question is what do they really know. I beleive some of them dont even like us or see us as just idiots. If they did tell us , then it would have a catastrophic effect.
I would go with bacteria in the universe. Intelligent life from running down deer and avoiding the competition to star ships. We are a rare indeed.
Arthur C. Clarke summed it up well. There are two possibilities. WE are either alone or we are not, both are equally possible and both are equally terrifying!
I think you miss earth moon as possible life creator on earth. So speak to women and add period to famous Man equation !
A ramped up version of the talk I heard at the local natural science society, with some inane audience members weighing in obviously cosseted by too much telly and look it can't get away from addressing existential loneliness when it tries as hard as this.
Something stupid….but think about it. Have you ever thought that the UFOs we see in space or the sky are perhaps us coming back to earth. As we know, people who travel at the speed of light(or perhaps even faster…who knows) tend to have their time slowing down(in the ship) while everything which does not travel at this speed outside the ship gets older quicker(vs the people inside the ship). What would happen if once we are quite advanced but get attacked by a colony, our masters + a large colonie would have to leave the solar system to hide for some time. For them it might be just 100 years but what happens if due to their speed, over 10 000 years have passed? By the time they come back, we would been again back to the the start of the evolutionary process(as 99% of us would have once again be wiped out), what would this means? Well, if "we" live with a super advanced mind and technology, then come back to see ourselves with low IQ and animal like behavior, it would be a risk to speak back to our own race. But we would still be intrigued as this would be our mother planet. I think they would then keep flying around us to make sure that no other colonies would come back to hurt us. Look for the accident in Ukraine and the elephant foot(highly radioactive material), try to find out what happened when the elephant foot melted, something from the sky came down on it and brought down the radioactivity to safer levels, could this be our own civilisation now looking after us? People saw the flying saucers for some time over the elephant foot, meaning that they were actively trying to save us from a massive nuclear disaster in Tchernobyl https://www.aetherius.org/evidence/chernobyl/.
If there is no alien life, how do you confirm that?
The most easily understood explanation of the Drake Equation ever. Well done
Thanks also for pointing out Darwin was just one of many positing adaptive evolution and had it not been for Wallace and Darwins own ego he would not be even heard of.
The question of the evolution of the best adapted comes to mind here.
Technologically advanced communicative civilisations are inherently less 'biologically fit' and our comprehension of communicative systems is about as advanced as our physics.
Lets suppose billions of planets are populated by fungal mycelium, (it seems inevitable spores are ubiquitous) of descent from those on other planets all across the galaxy. Those systems would be communicating, although not 'intelligent' by the measure of having no radio telescope, but thier biological fitness and expansion may prove that if your organism is to conquer the universe then evolving radio telescopes and super inflated egoism is a dead end!
I think we should re-word the part of the Drake Equation stating "[worlds] where life has arisen" to "where life has survived", as the original wording doesn't seem to take Panspermia into consideration. The more I learn about this subject, it's the hypothesis I most believe in. How can only 1 successful genesis have occurred on Earth in 6 billion years, throughout all of its geologic and hydrologic ages and states? That seems absurd to me. I think it came from elsewhere, and when / if we find life under the surfaces of other worlds in our system, it will be related to us, and we'll never know from whence it really came.
16:38 We build radio telescopes and sure as hell aren't even trying to communicate outside our planet.
20:56 Why in the hell would they transmit to us?
23:00 You're ignoring the magnetosphere, which only formed when "Theia" crashed into Earth. How likely is that?